Power Aware Resource Allocation in Virtualized Environments through VM Behavior Identification

Virtualization technology enables server and service consolidation to save more power and operational costs of large scale computing systems. However, the consolidation nature of virtualization intensifies the power densities in a rack, thus resulting in higher probability of failures and Service Level Agreements violations under constrained power budget. In this paper, we proposed a power aware resource allocation algorithm, named PaRA, to coordinate and tradeoff the power and performance. In order to provide enough information about power characteristics of individual VM and applications, we use agent for workload characterization and estimation. The real actuation of resource allocation is realized within the Virtual Machines Monitor (VMM). We evaluated our algorithm on a real Xen based virtualization environments with 3 VMs. The results show that the proposed approach can achieve a higher SLA satisfaction rate as 99.6 percent in RUBiS web application, and power consumption savings up to 17.6 percent compared to default Xen resource allocator. The results also show the potential of our algorithm to be used in real virtualization environments.